Rob Penn: This could be the dawn of a golden age of the bicycle

A nation getting back in the saddle: cycling enthusiasts in the annual Prudential RideLondon event (Picture: Alamy) Alamy

I ‘ve never raced bicycles but I’ve always loved the Tour de France. I’m a great believer that if you’ve ever experienced a moment of awe or freedom on a bicycle, if you’ve ever taken flight from sadness to the rhythm of two spinning wheels, or felt the resurgence of hope pedalling to the top of a hill with the dew of effort on your forehead, if you’ve ever wondered, swooping bird-like down a long hill on a bicycle, if the world was standing still; or, just once, sat on a bicycle with a singing heart, then you share something fundamental with all cyclists, including the professionals.

The Grand Départ coming to London on Monday is both a cause and an effect of our increased participation in cycling. The organisers of the Tour de France are only bringing their beloved race across the Channel because they know that we’ll paint the UK yellow. Sky wouldn’t pump millions into the sport (and follow it up by investing in the grass-roots GoSkyRide schemes) unless our nation was getting back in the saddle. Perhaps they sense, as I do, that we might be at the dawn of a new golden age of the bicycle in this country.

The bicycle fulfils a broad church of practical, physical and emotional uses. I ride a bicycle to get to work, often for work, to keep fit, to stay sane, to bathe in air and sunshine, to go shopping, to savour the physical and emotional fellowship of riding with friends, to travel, for a moment of grace in a dizzying world, occasionally to scare myself and to hear my boy laugh. Sometimes I ride my bicycle just to ride my bicycle. I own 11. I don’t need 11 bicycles, but I couldn’t live without one.

The bicycle is the most efficient form of human-powered transportation yet devised and one of mankind’s greatest inventions. It’s up there with the printing press, the electric motor, the telephone, penicillin and the World Wide Web. The bicycle is also the most popular form of transport on the planet: it has been for over a century. Our ancestors thought it was one of their greatest achievements. That idea is slowly coming back into fashion, as more and more of us grow to appreciate the simplicity and the utility of the machine.

Cycle racing initially became popular during the last great, golden age of the bicycle in the 1890s, at the time the machine first became the utilitarian form of transport for the masses. Bordeaux-Paris, a 560km night-day event inaugurated in 1891, Paris-Brest-Paris also in 1891, Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 1892, Paris-Roubaix in 1896 and the Tour de France in 1903 all helped create the enduring relationship between the sport and human suffering.

While “massed-start” road races like the Tour became the norm on the Continent, the sport was strangled in Britain by the convention of Victorian rule-makers. We preferred “time trials”, first codified in the 1890s by one Frederick Thomas Bidlake, a man with a peculiarly British passion for time-keeping: competitors set off at intervals and rode alone, against the clock, up and down wind-slapped A-roads.

Excellence in time-trialling did manifest itself in gold for Sir Bradley Wiggins at the London Olympics. However, massed-start rides are far more exciting. These races entail breakaways and sprint finishes, chases and crashes, suffering and solidarity, tactics and alliances, co-operation and competition, vanity and honour. Massed-start road racing is underpinned by the unwritten etiquette of the peloton, something so complex that not even a Victorian Englishman could codify it into a booklet of rules.

For most of the 20th century, the British showed poorly in competitive, massed-start road racing. The best known of a small handful of British riders who made it on the Continent was the valiant Tommy Simpson. He died in the 1967 Tour de France, 1.5km from the top of the infamous Mont Ventoux. Simpson, though, would have been proud of the current generation of British riders who have finally ignited widespread interest in one of the world’s greatest sporting events.

Bicycles are now fashionable. That may not last, but it’s indicative of how health concerns, transport issues, the environment, the profile of cycle sport, the price of oil and an interest in improving urban life are driving the bicycle back to the centre of public consciousness. To have the Mayor of London, senior politicians, newspaper editors, media moguls, retired sportsmen, fashion gurus and a host of leading businessmen all riding and often advocating cycling would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago.

London is probably now the centre of global cycling culture. There are more bicycle-related concepts and retail ideas being born here than in any other city and a huge number of small, flowering bicycle businesses. This is amazing when you think that it remains one of the worst cities in the world to ride in.

The bicycle has a propensity to create sub-cultures. Its resurgent popularity encourages us to form up in well-defined groups. There are Mamils (Middle-Aged Men in Lycra), fixed-gear freaks, commuters, club racers, mountain bikers, BMXers and dirt jumpers. Ride from Hackney Wick to Richmond Park at rush hour and you’ll see all of the sub-cultures out on two wheels. I suspect they will all be lining the route of the Tour through the capital.

The world’s first cycling magazine, Le Vélocipède Illustré, concluded in an editorial in 1869: “The steel horse fills a gap in modern life. It is an answer not only to its needs, but also to its aspirations… It’s quite certainly here to stay.”

If you believe the same thing could be written today, then you have good reason to cheer the man in the Maillot Jaune as he tears along the Victoria Embankment and down The Mall on Monday.

Rob Penn is the author of It’s All About the Bike (Penguin) and a director of Bikecation (bikecation.co.uk)